Here's a little piece from composer/improvisor Douglas Ewart to start
your day off right. Enjoy "Red Hills" as performed by N.S.A Ensemble.

About the composer:

Perhaps
best known as a composer, improviser, sculptor and maker of masks and
instruments, Douglas R. Ewart is also an educator, lecturer, arts
organization consultant and all around visionary. In projects done in
diverse media throughout an award-winning and widely-acclaimed 40-year
career, Mr. Ewart has woven his remarkably broad gifts into a single
sensibility that encourages and celebrates--as an antidote to the
divisions and compartmentalization afflicting modern life-the wholeness
of individuals in culturally active communities.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1946, Douglas R. Ewart immigrated to
Chicago, Illinois in the United States in 1963. His travels throughout
the world and interactions with diverse people since then has, again and
again confirmed his view that the world is an interdependent entity. An
example of his efforts both to study and to contribute to this
interdependence is his use of his prestigious 1987 U.S.-Japan Creative
Arts Fellowship to study both modern Japanese culture and the
traditional Buddhist shakuhachi flute, and also to give public
performances while in Japan.

In America, his determination to spread his perspective is part of the
inspiration behind his often multi-disciplinary works and their
encouragement of artist-audience interactions. It is also the basis of
the teaching philosophy with which he guides his classes at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has taught since 1990, and the
basis of the perspective he has brought to his service on advisory
boards for institutions such as The National Endowment for the Arts,
Meet the Composer (New York City) and Arts Midwest. Mr. Ewart uses his
past experience as chairman of the internationally renowned Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) to celebrate and build
upon the history and achievements of the organization, and is from this
perspective a natural extension of the activities he has been engaged in
for the past four decades.

His administrative, teaching and other duties have not prevented Ewart
from maintaining several musical ensembles, the Nyahbingi Drum Choir.
the Clarinet Choir, Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions, Douglas R. Ewart
& Quasar and Douglas R. Ewart & Stringnets. Nor has it prevented
him from releasing some of the resulting music on his own record label,
Aarawak Records (founded in 1983), which has released his Red Hills and
Bamboo Forest, Bamboo Meditations at Banff, Angles of Entrance, New
Beings, and Velvet Fire.
Always seeking new ways to be an agent of transformation, and convinced
that compositions should change, just as their performers do, Ewart has
created new or revised musical forms, such has his suite “Music from the
Bamboo Forest,” which is in a state of constant evolution (its score
currently comprises six movements employing a cornucopia of flutes,
reeds, percussion instruments--many of them handmade -- and significant
audience participation). Each performance or production by Ewart
reflects time-tested structures, but each also incorporates his most
immediate experiences of America and the world, and taps his many
creative engagements with collaborators such the master musicians as
Muhal Richard Abrams, Amina Myers, Beah Richards, the Art Ensemble of
Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Curran, Anthony Davis, Von Freeman, Fred
Anderson, Joseph Jarman, Yusef Lateef, Roscoe Mitchell, Ajule Sonny
Rutlin, Rita Warford, Dee Alexander, Robert Dick, George E. Lewis, James
Newton, Cecil Taylor, Richard Teitelbaum and Henry Threadgill.

Beyond sound itself, Ewart’s music finds natural extensions (in every
sense of the word) in the instruments he makes, which run the gamut from
unique wind instruments to percussion instruments. Beyond these are
sculptures, sound sculptures, and individually handcrafted masks that
have been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute
of Chicago, among others. All these elements of his art are on display
every year in Chicago and in other cities in stagings of “Crepuscule,”
which in Ewart’s own opinion best represents his celebratory spontaneity
and commitment to organic inclusivity. A massive collective
composition, “Crepuscule” is a celebration of sunset that brings
together diverse musical groups, dancers, artists and activist for a
musical and visual event that has become one of the signature programs
of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, being held annually at the city's
Washington Park. Ewart improvises with the scores of other performers
who come together for “Crepuscule” by using not only well-known wind
instruments but also his own wondrously inventive percussion instruments
(crutches, oars and skis transformed by cymbals and bells). In addition
to having been adopted as an annual ritual in Chicago, “Crepuscule” has
been performed in Philadelphia, PA and Minneapolis, MN, and employed by
the Banlieues Bleues Festival in Paris, France to unite the diverse
artistic and ethnic cultures of Paris’ inner city communities.

Ewart is the winner of the Bush Artists Fellowship (1997), Minnesota Composers
Forum/McKnight Foundation fellowships, Jerome Foundation grants, Mayor
Harold Washington's Outstanding Artist Award and a Naropa Institute
residency among many other honors. He has performed at the Moers
International Festival (Germany), at the University of Puerto Rico San
Juan, throughout Brazil, in Tokyo, Perth, Havana, Paris, Stockholm,
London, Düsseldorf and Berlin; in the U.S. he has performed at Mobius
(Boston), The Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), the Walker Art
Center (Minneapolis), the Science Museum (St. Paul), 1750 Arch Street
(Berkeley), Painted Bride (Philadelphia), Creative Arts Collective
(Detroit), Lincoln Park Zoo and the Field Museum of Natural History
(Chicago), Merkin Hall, the Public Theater, The Kitchen and Carnegie
Hall (New York). He has led workshops and lectured at Louisiana Nature
Center (New Orleans), University of Illinois Unit One (Champaign), the
Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC.), Northwestern University
(Evanston), University of Chicago and the Banff Center for the Arts
(Alberta, Canada).